A patch and a model!

I’ve just come back from 4 days alone at a beautiful cottage at Kjerringvik (Old Bitch Bay) on the coast of Southern Norway. Fantastic weather and very warm sea for the time of year. Apart from swimming I spent my time reading* and clearing up a max/msp control patch for the solenoid valves of the Electromagnetic Fountain. These valves should open and close when digital electromagnetic signals are detected. It’s not exactly rocket science on my part – based on a patch I made with Piotr Pachjel for the airbrush gun valves of the Emotion Organ project, with the “bucket object” (as suggested by Ellen Røed) – but I think it is a good start for work with my current plan of using a lanbox/junction box, etc.

(click for larger image)

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An electrician had been working on the electrical wiring in the cottage just prior to my visit, and left behind a box of discarded cables and other bits and bobs. I used them to try and construct a small model of the fountain that showed its jets, bending and weaving copper wire with my fingers.

So the red-tipped wires are meant to represent the detected peaks and troughs of digital signals, the white-tipped wires the amplitude of the detected analogue signals and the yellow-tipped wire, the total average of all detected signals. ( I am still trying to work out what I mean by “total average”).

The model is based on a suggestion at the meeting with NLI Engineering AS (see previous post); using 1 dry water pump located in the fountain base, as opposed to my idea of using several submersible pumps. The solenoid valves are also located in the base, each with its own pipe that extends into the watery bit, with a nozzle attached. Each nozzle lies just below the water surface. The “white” and “yellow” nozzles are also served by the same pump.

* Gravity’s Rainbow/T. Pynchon, Instruments and the Imagination/Hankins and Silverman, Infrastructure. The book of everything for the industrial landscape/B Haynes, and In the Desert of Desire. Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle/W.L Fox.

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